ABSTRACT
This paper attempts to understand how decentralisation unfolds in the mega city context of urban India as a result of shifts in policy and practice since the 1990s through a study of recent civil society organisation partnerships with the urban local bodies in Mumbai. Using the cases of Advanced Locality Management (ALM) groups and Local Area Citizens’ Groups (LACGs) as instances of parallel structures of decentralisation, it argues that such civil society organisations have usually been spearheaded by the professional middle classes and have transformed the public sphere in mega cities. However, a closer look reveals that many of the features of these state–civil-society partnerships are inherently exclusionary of lower socioeconomic city residents. Resultantly, these go against the letter and spirit of democratic decentralisation as envisaged in the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act 1992, which provides the framework for urban decentralisation in India. New initiatives in decentralisation under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission—a major urban development programme launched in 2005—have further rendered the space for decentralised participation extremely fragmentary.
